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Comment by ilyanep

11 years ago

Unless you're going to tell me that 'fsck' was intentionally named to conjure up the idea of the word 'fuck' when mentioned, your example is completely unrelated and only a red herring. 'bro' is a tool that was explicitly named 'bro' because it's a play on words with 'man', and so there was an explicit choice made to associate the tool with 'bro' and 'brogrammer', etc. If you can't see the difference, I really have to wonder about the average quality of commenter on this site anymore.

Once we get past that stage, are we really overthinking the consequences of the name? Personally, as a male, the name doesn't really bother me beyond the association of the term 'brogrammer' with fratty programmers who drink a lot and don't even code that well (and tbh, I think that alone should be a stereotype one would want to avoid). However, should we at least consider and discuss the implications of asking a female programmer to ask a 'bro' for advice whenever she doesn't know something? Words don't necessarily mean only what you want them to mean. Sometimes they mean what people take them to mean.

It would be extremely surprising to me if fsck wasn't recognized to be tongue-in-cheekly profane when it was originally named. It could easily have been called ckfs, chkdisk (as it was on other systems), etc. Fsck first appeared on Version 7 UNIX, which means it dates to the early 80s, long after "fuck" had been established as one of the most popular profanities in English. It's context of usage, when the filesystem had become corrupt and the administrator was in a state of annoyance or anger, is also suggestive.